You can watch videos right on the site in their own custom interface which is consistent no matter which site's video you are viewing. You can also click through to visit the original web site, if desired. When you're finished viewing, you can share videos with friends and leave comments and recommendations - an experience common to most internet video sharing sites. As you're watching a video, you can continue browsing for more videos while keeing the current video playing in the right sidebar.

You can also customize Invision.tv so it matches your interests. Like YouTube, you can subscribe to channels and create playlists, but Invision.tv lets you embed those playlists on your own web site or blog. However, what's different about this site compared to many other video portals is that, behind-the-scenes, their recommendation engine is scouring the site to find new video choices to present to you which match up with the type of content you find interesting. Here at RWW, we like recommendation engines so we're looking forward to giving this one a test drive.

Making a guide or tutorial with Whizle is supposed to be a piece of cake. In our tests of the service we found it to be dead simple. In creating a Whizle, we were given steps for creating a title, mission statement, and steps with descriptions. The service provides both a WYSIWYG editor for formatting text and a more interactive application for creating a whizle. We found the interactive app to be more appealing and easier to use. If you don't need all the bells and whistles the WYSIWYG editor will do just fine. Adding and removing steps for our tutorial was simple. We were also able to add Youtube videos and Flickr photos to help visualize our guide. All in all, the service did exactly what it said it would without any fuss.

Who is Whizle For?

We don't recommend using Whizle for any hardcore tutorials such as a design tutorials. Formatting images is not one of Whizle's specialties. We'd really like to recommend the service to bloggers, marketers, and those in PR looking to create simple guides for clients. Unfortunately, there isn't an option to embed any of the whizles you create. Your creations stay on the Whizle site where viewers are allowed to comment and edit your whizle if you allow them to. The service could also use a little more work in the design department. It's dead simple interface was a bit of a turn-off for us. However this is all preferential. Overall, Whizle is functional enough for beginners, but anyone looking for a more advanced tool will have to keep searching.

While data portability is a hot topic of the day, there hasn't been a lot of tangible work done around the details yet. Idealware's guide could make implementation of these themes much more manageable. Readers may also be interested in this related discussion about data portability use cases over at the DataPortability.org public discussion.